


Nightmares

by moreagaara



Series: The Emperor Revived [6]
Category: Warhammer 40.000
Genre: Altered Mental States, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blood, Blood Magic, Blood and Gore, Blood and Violence, Cooking, Cross-Post, Cross-Posted on deviantArt, Deviates From Canon, Dreams, Dreams and Nightmares, Emperor Revived, Explanations, Family, Family Bonding, Family History, Family Secrets, Fanfiction, Flashbacks, Gen, God - Freeform, God Problems, Literature, Mental Health Issues, Mental Instability, Nightmares, Originally Posted Elsewhere, Originally Posted on deviantART, Past Violence, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, Science Fiction, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Talking, Understanding, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-12
Updated: 2019-09-12
Packaged: 2020-10-14 23:21:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,219
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20609018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moreagaara/pseuds/moreagaara
Summary: Sometimes the worst one is to talk to people.Peep ownership:Games Workshop:  WH40k and relatedMe:  the writing and the Emperor's name





	Nightmares

**Author's Note:**

> Sometimes the worst one is to talk to people.
> 
> Peep ownership:  
Games Workshop: WH40k and related  
Me: the writing and the Emperor's name

_Daenus stumbled more and more often as he walked onwards. He didn’t have any particular direction in mind, but there was something else that did. It guided him always towards the nearest, largest group of people. Sometimes they were stuck in trenches, like the men who had killed his brother, and sometimes they were in the bombed shells of towns, trying to hide from soldiers like what he had once been. It didn’t matter to Daenus. It didn’t matter who they were, why they fought, if they fought, what they wanted out of their lives. None of that mattered to him. They were alive, and he wanted them dead, and he was more than capable of killing them._

_The soldiers would try to stop him with bullets, aiming first at his torso and then at his head when the bullets failed to stop him. They only made him come on faster, since they had attracted his attention. Once they had tried to kill him with a tank, but by that point he had killed so many that he was able to use the sheer volume of blood around him to crush the tank into a ball the size of his fist, with all the men still inside. Over and over again they tried to poison him with gases, and he never once fell. The poison had no effect on him, and the air smelled just as sweet and pure as ever._

_The civilians would fight him with whatever they had to hand, be that a pitchfork, a car, or a cooking knife. One old woman tried to stop him by claiming that he had saved her and her mother once. He didn’t care. He was beyond caring now. If she was speaking the truth, then he had made a mistake in the past, and told her so. She choked to death on her own blood. Her young granddaughter tried to kill him with a toy knife; he considered that shameful and tore it from her hand, then gave her a real knife to cut him with. He played with her until the sun went down and she was too exhausted to move. Then he killed her._

_Her skull and that of her grandmother were two of the few skulls he had seen fit to take with him on his rampage. There were three others: a soldier who claimed he was from his brother Horus, who had refused to fight him; an old man who said he’d already told his family to run and that he was only there to defend their farm, an old man he’d finally killed after fetching each member of his family out of the basement and butchering them in front of him; and a mayor who had led a spirited defense of his town against him._

_Daenus hoped they despaired, seeing what he did now. Knowing that he couldn’t be stopped, that he was far too powerful. Sometimes, he would whisper stories to them, stories about how his brothers had died. Humans had killed them, all of them, every single one of them, and it was Daenus’s sacred purpose to destroy them in vengeance._

_It was so, so easy to kill; it felt so good, so right. He moved in a manner that no human being would have considered normal; half hunched over onto his bad leg, he limped along in an almost insectoid manner. He looked about him in jerking, twitching movements, trying to find any hint of motion in the world around him. Anything that did move died horrifically._

_There, just ahead of him. Something fell. His form collapsed into thought, and found himself within the body of whoever had dropped their gun, and exploded their body as he reformed himself from their blood. There were more around him, many more, and he smiled as he started to dance—_

~~*~~

Daenus bolted up from his chair. He clutched his head, gritted his teeth, thankful that no one dared to disturb him these days. He hadn’t meant to trance out like that; it was the only way he got close to sleep anymore, and while he could theoretically stay awake as long as he wanted, he found that the trances that approximated sleep helped him stay at least somewhat connected to the human condition. Unfortunately, they had a nasty side effect of triggering old memories, ancient memories from a time best forgotten. A time when he had lost every trace of sanity, out of despairing love for his brother Sanguinius.

Newer memories flashed in front of his eyes; his gut reaction was to avoid them too, but decided it was better to face them, or he would start remembering these in his sleep as well. They always began the same: Sanguinius would be dead in the trenches, and then he would be dead on the floor of Horus’s flagship. Horus would stand over him, the heads of some of his favorite kills strapped to his belt. Unholy power swelled his body, and he taunted the Emperor, taunted his brother to do something about this latest kill.

The memory faded as he confronted it. It always did. Perhaps it would be best if he confronted the older memories as well, but…he couldn’t. He never could. It was too frightening to witness exactly how far he had fallen, and just how far he was willing to go. Better to stay awake for a while. Maybe he should make some mortal food; it couldn’t sustain him any longer, but it still comforted him to cook and eat the stuff. A reminder of what he had been once, and what he longed to be again.

“I’ve noticed something,” someone said behind him. It didn’t take Daenus long to place the voice: Roboute. His brother, who finally knew what he was and what Daenus had done to bring him back. “You cook things when you’re upset.”

Daenus sighed. Guilliman was far too perceptive for his own good sometimes. “It was just a dream,” he said, trying to dismiss the conversation. He kept his attention on what he was doing.

“And the more complicated your cooking gets, the more upset you are,” his brother continued.

“Making ramen isn’t that complex,” Daenus protested defensively.

“It is when you’re making the noodles from scratch,” Roboute observed drily. “What happened?” he asked over Daenus’s wordless protests.

“Noth—” 

“Don’t even.” Daenus turned around to tell Roboute exactly what he could do with his ‘don’t evens’, but the words died on his lips when he saw the look on his brother’s face. Concern, caution, distrust. The third one hurt, and Daenus turned away again.

“You know that century and a half I don’t like to talk about?” he asked, trying to continue with his noodle-making. “That’s what I saw. I saw the beginning of that.” His hands were shaking, and he stopped stirring the dough to lace his fingers together. Control. He needed control before he lashed out and broke something worse than a countertop.

His brother sighed. “Would you just tell me what happened? I’m tired of you dancing around this topic like it’s something worse than anything you’ve done since I’ve known you—” he broke off when Daenus punched the wall, his fist sinking into the solid metal and leaving a dent that went up to his elbow.

“It is worse than anything else I’ve done, Roboute!” he roared. He had come so close to telling his brother what had happened when they’d first had a conversation, the day he’d been resurrected. He had remembered, with vivid clarity, everything that had happened, but all he had said was that he had lost himself for a century and a half, and that he had lost himself partially due to the influence of Khorne. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath to recenter himself. “I told you the important parts of what happened. I lost myself to Khorne and it took a century and a half for Horus to bring me back. Everything else is detail.”

But Guilliman didn’t take the hint. “You need to talk about it.”

“No, I _don’t_.” Daenus seethed, intended to make a piece of himself later to go and kill something on some battlefield somewhere; that would settle his need to punish Roboute for his impudence.

“Your eyes are going red.” Guilliman only stated a fact, and it hit Daenus in the face with all the force of an ancient freight train, or a bucket of ice-cold water being thrown at him. Now he felt his eyes drain of all color, and he leaned against the counter before him so he wouldn’t collapse to his knees immediately.

“Can’t you just leave it alone?” he asked, mostly of the floor. “It’s not going to magically get better just because I talk about it. Nothing can fix what I did. I would know. I tried just about everything.” He knew he was already weeping, and severed this particular co-location’s connection to the others. The Imperium didn’t need to know just how upset he was, if Roboute kept pushing.

“You were the one who said you had to stop keeping secrets, Daenus.” Roboute used his name. His first name. He never did that; he’d said it felt unnatural, so Daenus had let it alone. He still didn’t look up when he replied.

“Can’t I just keep one…?” he asked, plaintively. Childlike. He didn’t have to see his brother’s face to know the answer. He already knew it anyway. It didn’t make it any easier. His voice shuddered when he started talking. “So…you’ve seen the new Investiary. The new statues and all that. You’ve seen the relief on the walls, so you know how it starts. You know that when the first world war of ancient Terra rolled around, only myself, Horus, and Sanguinius were alive. And you’ve seen Sanguinius’s statue, so you know that he died during that war, and that I found him.”

“It was everything after that point on the relief that I couldn’t tell what it was you were trying to say,” Guilliman told him.

“Sanguinius died in my arms, Roboute. He died trying to save his men from poison gas. Mustard gas, actually. The same gas I later used on the armies attacking Angron on Nucreia. For the first time in twelve thousand years, I was able to hold one of my brothers as they died. I was able to mourn him. And the army that he’d just saved…they wouldn’t let me alone. I mean…technically we were on opposite sides, but…they pulled me away from him. They wouldn’t let me take him home, they wouldn’t let me bury him with the honor he deserved, even if he was on the wrong side.” Daenus looked up at his brother. He had no idea what color his eyes were now. “So I killed them. Every single one of them, and I used my magic to do it.

“It was their fault Sanguinius was even there in the first place. I killed them. I melted their brains, exploded their heads, turned their blood into spears to stab them. They tried to stop me, and they failed. I couldn’t be stopped, because I didn’t want to be. Then when they were all dead, I turned to the other side of the field, where my side was entrenched. I killed them too. It was their fault Sanguinius had died, because they were the ones that dropped the gas. I turned my hands into claws, and I ripped them to pieces. Something laughed inside my head, and I didn’t know or care what it was then. It gave me power and strength to keep going, to keep killing. I could have more so long as I kept the skulls coming.

“So I did that. I let whatever that force was guide me to the nearest, largest group of people, and when I got there, I would kill them. Most of them tried to fight. Sometimes I’d let them think they could win, but they never did. After a month or so of that, I started collecting the heads of those I thought had fought really well, or the ones I wanted to torment further. I tied them to my uniform, and then around my chest when that started to give out. I’d tell them stories about how all my other brothers had died, and why it was the collective fault of humanity that they were dead and I was doing this now.

“By the time I finally reached the coast…there was a port town. Soldiers who were wounded were being sent home, and fresh ones were arriving. Horus was among them. I…think he meant to track me down, and then we’d find Sanguinius and make him ‘surrender’ so we could all go home and be a proper family. But at the time, I didn’t care. By then, he was just another target. I don’t think I would even have noticed if I had managed to kill him. Maybe I would have taken his skull, maybe not. I don’t really know, and I never will, because he stopped me and took me home.”

Daenus took a deep breath at this point. “He had to keep me tied up like an animal, Roboute, because I wouldn’t stop trying to kill anyone and everyone that I saw, including him. When we finally got to his home, he had to keep me in the basement most of the time, and he had to keep the house locked and warded against my leaving, because if I’d gotten out…there was a city of millions within a few days’ walk. Not too far away from there was the nation’s capital. And that was the point I really lost my mind, because Khorne doesn’t like it when his devotees fail to kill things for more than a day. He couldn’t turn me into a chaos spawn instantly. No, I don’t know why; I just know that the worst he could do was slowly mutate me over a long period of time, and he could strip my mind and reason away, so that was what he did. I forgot how to walk. I forgot how to speak. I forgot how to think. I forgot how to remember.

“I didn’t remember why I was the way I was. I didn’t remember my brother’s name, or even my own most of the time. I didn’t remember who this person who insisted on coming down into the basement and trying to help me was. I forgot he was my brother, and it took years for that to come back. I wanted to forget reality. I wanted to just leave it all behind and hide somewhere, deep in my own mind, where no one could hurt me ever again, because as far as I knew, everyone I had ever known and everyone I had ever loved was dead. Nothing mattered, and nothing would ever matter again.

“Until Horus made them matter. Until he made me remember that he was my brother, and that I did still have someone to live for. Until he made me realize that there were things I could do besides killing. He was the one who made me realize that I didn’t need a simplified, animal version of myself for the world to make sense. And he was the reason that I chose order, when the whole world fell away despite his wishes, and I could see only two roads. One that led to Chaos. To Khorne, to murder and death, to being a Daemon Prince, where I could have everything I’d ever wanted, where even if death came for me, I would always come back…and one that led to hell.

“I chose the material world for him alone, and…within a few decades of me making that choice, Horus died. He decided to fly a brand-new rocket to Mars, taking the very first colonists with him, and they didn’t check the programming. It couldn’t handle the thrust the engines could produce, and the ship spun out of control. He did the only thing he could, and blew the entire thing up before it even left the atmosphere. In doing so, he saved thousands and possibly millions of lives on the ground. And because of everything he’d done, I stayed in the material world and I’ve tried to be better.

“Every single horrible decision I’ve made since then, since you’ve known me, is still better than that one. The one where I decided to start killing, and the one where I decided not to stop. The problem is, now I know exactly how far I can go, and I know exactly how much control I stand to lose. If that had happened during the Crusade, neither of us would be here. The Imperium wouldn’t be here, humanity wouldn’t be here…probably no other even vaguely sentient race in the entire galaxy would be here. If that were to happen now? Gods, Roboute, I can co-locate. There are thousands—hundreds of thousands of me, scattered across the whole of the Imperium, and if one of me falls…”

Daenus could only shake his head. “If one of me falls, then all the others are in danger. That’s a mental breakdown, and that whole fall is going to happen a lot faster now I’ve already been down that road. The only way it would be even remotely okay is if I figured out which co-locations were affected, and cut them off from all the rest before it could spread any further, and then those co-locations would need to be killed. And best of fucking luck with that. It took another blood mage of skill equal to my own to stop me last time, and I’m a fucking god now. A god that eats thousands of souls daily. And a fallen piece of me…they’d kill, then they’d eat the released soul, and in doing so, they’d get stronger. I’m not sure that…even I could stop me.”

He didn’t feel any better for telling Roboute about this last, greatest secret. If anything, he felt worse for telling him. He didn’t need this burden; he had enough already. Xander’s words rang in his head. He could deal with this on his own, and he had been for thousands of years now. Roboute didn’t need this. “I’m telling dad about this,” Guilliman said with finality. Daenus pretty much shrieked a ‘no’, but Roboute would have none of it. “Either I’m telling him, or you are. He needs to know. And more importantly, I need to know why he never came to help either of you, considering just how fast he can turn up just by my thinking about him.”

“We never called him or mom…” Daenus muttered. That had been what Hera had said. “I mean…I couldn’t have called him. And if I had, it would just have been to kill him. Maybe Horus just had his hands full or something.”

“He should have known what was going on and come without your calling,” Roboute replied. “…at least you come by being a shitty father honestly, I guess.”

Daenus barked a laugh through his shaking. It still didn’t help.


End file.
